Simplified food webs lead to energetic bottlenecks in polluted lakes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Very little is known about the consequence of human activities on the flow of energy through natural ecosystems. Here, we present a trophic-based approach to describing energy relationships in pollutant-disturbed lakes, emphasizing the importance of prey diversity in maintaining energy transfer to growing fish. Both diet and community analysis indicated that the food web leading to yellow perch (Perca flavescens) in metal-polluted lakes was extremely simplified compared with reference lakes. Through the application of an in situ marker for fish activity costs (muscle lactate dehydrogenase activity) and through bioenergetic modelling, we show how this has severe consequences on the efficiency of energy transfer to perch from their prey; premature energetic bottlenecks (zero conversion efficiency) occur when successively larger prey types are not available to growing perch. These observations provide a much needed ecological and physiological framework for assessing how energy transfer can be affected in polluted systems. Our approach need not be limited therein but should be applicable to any aquatic system where food web structure is variable and (or) disrupted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".